Category Archives: Links

• Apple as a boomer. Well, it is now a services company. And speaking of boomer, Reeder released a new app and I tried it for a while. Eventually I chose to keep to the classic Reeder. I am a creature of habit.





• The fountain pen market seems to be very lively these days. Special releases galore, and this store special of a Vanishing Point looks delicious.





• I keep hearing things about limiting the maximum your phone charges to, and I don’t see the point of artificially limiting your battery for a benefit that may or may not be shown to be true. Some people have run some of their own experiments.





• What is the philosophy of Dune?
  
  I have not seen the movies, and I decided I will give the books a go. It is really fascinating, once you get past the made-up words, and the way the narration keeps changing between characters and the characters’ respective inner monologues.





• An unprecedented level of drama in the fountain pen community resulted in this megathread that has some 3,000+ comments.

  
  Only time will tell whether the right judgment was passed, but for me, I have decided that there was no need to give this business any more of my business.





• Methods of solving Japanese crosswords

  
  The Japanese call them nonograms, and I chanced across the puzzle book at Daiso. I was hooked, and they allowed me to make good use of my pencil collection.





• The Last Tea Shop

  
  I was watching Brad Dowdy play one of those “journalling solo RPG things”, and decided to give this a go myself. Really fun.





• Plonk It

  
  A really cute name for a guide to the very fun geoguessr game. Yes, I have been playing too many games lately.





• Chimbridge Singlish Dictionary

  
  The site has a decent URL but the name of the site is a winner.

#Blog

• China’s ‘Small-Town Literature’ Trend
  An increasing number of travelers are visiting smaller cities and counties across China, hiring photographers to document their experiences.





• Although I am too old for this (back injury; muscles weakening in general), I sometimes revisit stuffing your travel bag so that you don’t even need to check in a bag and then sheepishly acknowledge maybe I can at most only do two-bag travel.





• Watching old Mythbusters episodes, and I like this traffic one.





• When heading near Seattle, it is time to do some revision on Grey’s Anatomy’s filming locations.





• Guardian asks: why did married couples stop sleeping in twin beds?
  Just a friendly reminder that what we find “traditional” or common sometimes does not have that much of a long history anyway. Be yourself; be cool; don’t harm anyone.





• How Republicans Became the ‘Barstool’ Party
  American politics descend into the abyss too often, and in the abyss, you can sometimes find barstools.





• The luxurious fantasy of suffering in Hanya Yanagihara’s novels
  I loved the term “luxurious fantasy of suffering” so much. Or luxurious suffering. So on the money for this author too.





• Flossing your teeth may protect against cognitive decline, research shows
  Introducing: a good reason for me to finally try to make this habit stick.





• This NYT piece on how Costco hacked the American shopping psyche was a good read.





• Long Walk by Stephen King caught my eye at the airport. My first Stephen King and it is such an old one, and then I learned that there will be a film adaptation. The book is very fascinating (though it is a slow burn and some might find it draggy), and I think I might watch the film when it comes out.





• I have listened to a podcast or two from this man (he speaks well) but is it a little too predictable that a man who seems so good at making broad statements turns out to have umm some issues?
  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• I went down a Tsai Ming-liang rabbit hole, and found this guide to his movies. The page is awesome.





• I was watching The 8 Show and learned the term “limousine liberal”. It is not new but I have not heard of it before. It calls out the hypocrisy of liberals of upper classes, who are insulated from the consequences of the programs/ principles they are peddling.





• When something hits Coffeezilla’s radar, you know it is gonna be good fun. This AI company’s latest product was also called “barely reviewable” by Marques Brownlee, and while I was skeptical of the advancements, the videos by MKBHD and Coffeezilla made me pay a little more attention.





• The pigeon problem in my neighbourhood has finally come too close for my liking. I had to look up homemade bird repellants.





• This Atlantic piece, titled The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop, came to my attention as I was pondering having carry-on only when I travel within the US. (I have little to no faith that the American domestic flight system would always work out in my favour. With the traffic involved, it is only a matter of time before one becomes part of the statistics pertaining to lost or delayed luggage.)

  
  That said, it might well be true that if everyone just checked in their luggage, the flight experience would be much enhanced.





• Shows like this are sometimes a little hard to watch because of the cringe-inducing characters, but for the sheer train-wreck potential, I spend some time watching Super Rich in Korea. Yong is from Singapore and claims to be top 1% of Singapore’s rich (which isn’t that rich so maybe he was aiming for accuracy, good job). He is so awkward that you begin to feel for him.

  
  Yes, I suppose only a certain type would agree to go on a TV show, and well, the man did get a piece on Singapore’s broadsheet focused entirely on him.

  
  PS. In the next month, Yong gets another piece focused on him. He might have done better for himself if he had chosen to not engage the journalist for this second piece.

• I found old notes I made, and I had copied a part of T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton on a piece of foolscap paper. I guess that was an early version of a commonplace book. I duly copied the text into my current system. And of course, I had to go read What “Into the Rose Garden” Means.
  





• Reading Compass is a true exercise of the mind. I enjoy reading it but have to take breaks from it. Mathias Énard is quite an interesting character but mostly because the world he inhabits is so foreign to me. I first saw the book in the UK a few years ago, and finally got down to getting myself a copy. I contemplated reading it on the library app, but this is the kind of book that has to be read in hard copy form.
  





• Six Famous Notebook Users





• Apparently the concept of wind phones is not new, but I just read about one on Whigbey Island.
  
  The desire to speak to those who have departed is not an uncommon one (though I personally do not have it), and I guess there is just something about speaking into a receiver.





• It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight, study suggests.
  But if time-restricted eating helps you to cut calories, it works!





• I sometimes wonder if I am half a naturalist. I cannot be that much of one because I live in a concrete jungle sometimes masquerading as a garden city. But every once in a while, books on the natural world catch my eye.





• On having no visual memory
  
  I do not see images in my head. And reading about it felt so gratifying. It feels like oversharing if I tell someone about it, but I have been wanting to find someone else I know who is also this way. [The story behind how the condition came to have a name is an amusing one.]





• Behold, a commonplace book in the form of a website.

• We Shouldn’t Have Let Ryan Adams Cover Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’
  I loved the album. I wasn’t a fan of either artist then, but the album suited my mood in 2015/ 2016. Since then, Adams has faced a reckoning of sorts and I have stopped listening to the album. Given Taylor Swift’s success today, it seemed hilarious to read that it took Adams covering Swift for her to be taken seriously. I say “seemed” because it should not be that way. It is not funny.





• Sometimes I read a random blog post off my RSS reader, and then install a new browser. It is 2024; who needs a new browser?





• Bring back cubicles!
  Everything is relative. (I would ask for the return of a room with a window, fuck you very much.)





• Kokuyo Fine Writer
  Something I picked up at the Haneda airport, and could not find anything on it, until I searched YouTube and found Japanese vloggers showing off their new loot (with this link in the video description).





• I loved Stay True by Hua Hsu, and admired the writing, the photographs, the fact that he kept old letters/ faxes. Here’s a profile on the man.





• Reading Octavia E Butler led me down the path towards process theology. I am a bit late to the game because her books apparently hit bestseller lists in the thick of the pandemic. It is eerie, to me living presently in 2024, how a book written 30 years ago and set in 2024, predicted so many things so well. God is change.





• A notecard system as your commonplace book. I had a stack of index cards lying around (because I used to have a hipster PDA), ahem, and so I now have a commonplace book in the form of index cards.





• Lessons from the last Swiss finishing school
  Such a good read. Seems like a rich-person’s version of a hobby, vs. me thinking about having drum lessons.

• Wait, is white noise harmful for sleep now?
  I put on some sleep story or calming music or white noise for an hour when I go to sleep. I hadn’t known that the long-term safety of white noise is debatable.





• There are cyber jurors on China’s food apps to help manage disputes between buyers and sellers.
  What a bizarre concept but crowdsourcing justice should work with the reasonable man on the street is indeed reasonable.





• Why your law firm isn’t anywhere near as profitable as you think
  Because the equity partners’ drawings are not included in the sums. Also, the pay levels in the US are so crazy. And hey, Big Law associates never had it better.





• As a journal nerd, this post on the short history of the daily planner was gold.





• A tool for Amazon shoppers. It analyses and filters out reviews.





• Looking at fountain inks again, and this is a nice orange.





• How had I not known about Pocket Mod?
  It is so amusing. I made the tiny booklet and carried it around with me for a while. Sometimes, low-tech is best. I used to carry a hipster PDA at work. It was just a stack of index cards!





• I was planning jogs in Tokyo.
  Dress My Run was useful. It was amusing to me that it was only at 7°C that the recommendation changes to long-sleeve T-shirt. At 8°C, a short sleeved tee is still the garment of choice. In any case, I followed the example of the locals, and had a outer shell on. It was around 5-8°C and quite windy.





• Should you flush with toilet lid up or down? Study says it doesn’t matter
  My bafflement continues.





• I was reading a review on a memoir, and a reviewer mentioned she is a fan of memoirs and has read many of them. When I went to her Goodreads profile, I was suitably impressed by her reading history.





• Tokyo Sakura Tram: Experience Tokyo’s Secret Neighborhoods, Off the Beaten Path!
  We spied the Sakura Tram line on the map while at I-don’t-know-which JR station, and decided we would spend a day exploring.





• A review of the Vision Pro which I enjoyed reading.

• Feist and Hundreds of Choir Members Sing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ in Tribute
  A lovely piece.





• Reddit finally takes its API war where it belongs: to AI companies
  But it is all too late now, for me, at least. RIP, Apollo.





• Why does the US military spend so much on Viagra?
  Erectile dysfunction is linked to PTSD and various medical conditions. Interesting factoid.





• ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ending explained: What happens to the Ushers?
  I love this show. It made me go dig out an old copy of Edgar Allan Poe and I re-read it quickly.





• Running as therapy for depression?
  Promising.





• Billionaires are out of touch and much too powerful. The planet is in trouble
  Rebecca Solnit calls it as it is.





• Microsoft’s ugly sweater for 2023 is Windows XP’s iconic default wallpaper
  I only just learned about this. I love the Clippy one!





• Swift is Time’s person of the year
  This is a good read.





• Young, smart and want to save lives? Become a banker, says philosopher
  I was reading Michael Lewis’ book on SBF and this concept of effective altruism came up. Sounds like a nice way for a finance bro to justify himself. (I love philosophy, and sophistry is a nice sub-topic.)





• 5 Reasons Why Chinese Tourists Are So ‘Rude’ And ‘Uncivilized’
  This came up because we have been hearing anecdotes about how the Japanese hospitality sector has been wrecked by tourists from a particular region.

• Hanif Kureishi writes an essay on friendship.
  I like this expression – “purposive idleness”.





• China is now more Japanese than Japan
  That day I learned of the “Japanification index”, which is measured by the sum of the output gap, the inflation rate and short-term interest rates. The lower the score, the more Japanese you were.





• The evil of banality
  Yes, sometimes it seems strange that our collective intelligence should have us end up the boring normies we are. Even our differences and the intolerance we sneak in between our political incorrectness, and all the stupid things we do, are any of them a surprise?





• You can tell me spending time in nature is good for me, but when you tell me it needs to be 2 hours a week, I feel a mild demotivating force arising.





• A neckband speaker seems like a good idea. The younger me would not have imagined the options we have for speakers and microphones these days. Perhaps I might even have expected we’d have jumped to ear implants by now. Somewhat relatedly, I came across an old page on the Oregon Trail generation. (In a way, we were lucky, to be able to grow up in that particular slice in time.)





• Pluralistic explains the long con of social media platforms locking in users and businesses. I hope we are on our way to being free of the shit that these platforms have wrought; this piece is a good summary of what we had found ourselves enmeshed in.





• Javelin
  Sufjan Stevens’ latest album is beautiful.

• How Does an Air Ionizer Work?
  Ionizers produce ozone, and they are unable to remove larger particles like dust and dander, and they cannot destroy doors and gases.





• Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison
  A lovely little story about the power of music.





• Shuttle Flash has a compiled a video of the antics of possibly the most unloved professional badminton player. Everytime I watch a video of her playing, I have to turn down the sound. The other professionals would keep a stoic face but it is clear that these antics take a toll. On the players, the umpires, the viewers, the noble ideal we call sportsmanship…





• The Handi Desk
  Good man makes his own portable desk. There are also shots of his drawings from inside the notebook.





• I read the book, and saw that there was a Netflix movie too. But before I committed to watching, I had already read Who Is Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy For?





• Some iconic Vancouver locations from the X-Files
  This year, it is 30 years old, and a documentary film will be released. !





• Oral phenylephrine is ineffective as a decongestant. See e.g. this CNN piece. This has been known for a while. (PS. This information does not apply to phenylephrine administered in a nasal spray.)
  
  





• I enjoyed this podcast episode on Pen Addict. My pen and ink buying days are over (on hold?) but sometimes it is fun to listen to people nerd out over pen and paper.
  





• Old notes to myself
  Ah, the boldness of thick black marker on an envelope.





• How to Convert Celsius to Fahrenheit Without Doing Any Math
  Not bad a converter! 04 C = 40 F, 16 C = 61 F, 28 C = 82 F and 40 C = 104 F





• Ranked: The Most Popular Paid Subscription News Websites
  This is from 2021. It’s NYT, Waco and then WSJ. Second place has half the number of subscribers of number one.





• This is a really nice camping chair.
  
  

• Personal infidelity and professional conduct in 4 settings (Another link here)
  
  Police, financial advisors, CEOs/ CFOs who use a marital infidelity website are significantly more likely to engage in professional misconduct. The findings suggest that personal and workplace behaviour are closely related.

  
  Or perhaps it so happens that those who bother to sign up for the website are stupider with their recklessness.





• IMAX emulates PalmPilot software to power Oppenheimer’s 70 mm release
  
  A major dose of nostalgia for the early 2000s.





• Reading the Wirecard book makes you curious about the whistleblower.
  
  National University of Singapore’s law school is referred to as “elite law college” in the book. Amusing.





• Kindness as a signifier of intelligence?
  
  That’s a nice way to encourage kindness.





• Always wanted a Jieldé lamp, but somehow I haven’t reached that stage in my life yet.





• I was just checking out this young man’s bookshelf and one thing led to another, and then I am trying out Story Graph, an alternative to Goodreads. I find the stats interesting and useful for you to discover more about your reading habits, and the recommendations on Story Graph are better than on Goodreads. Goodreads has so much data and so much money (being owned by Amazon) but it has for years been steadfastly stuck in terms of design and what it offers you.